Aequitas, Hope Anika [android pdf ebook reader .TXT] 📗

of turn, and they are ridiculously loyal. Some say it is because those he surrounds himself with are people he’s helped, although this is hearsay, and not something easily demonstrable. Only one consensus appears to exist with regard to Cian Lazarus Ahearn: he is someone with whom one does not fuck.

“Hoser,” she added.

Because it had to be him. Had to.

Didn’t it?

The one who’d appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost solidifying from mist. The one who’d simply arrived one day, his words a shocking trespass as they’d scrolled across one of her flat screens.

I know who you are.

She hadn’t responded. Not at first. No, she’d destroyed her equipment and re-routed her connections. She’d told herself it was inevitable, that she’d known someone would find her eventually, and she’d rebuilt her security.

And then it had happened again. And again. So often she came to know he would be there, no matter what she did. No matter how deeply she hid. No matter how far she fled. Which was infuriating.

And terrifying.

Because he stalked her with devastating skill, relentless and unwavering. He infiltrated her security again and again, finding her even when she was nothing more than a faint curl of smoke, the tiniest of digital signatures. He signed himself Lazarus, and he came and went like the ghost he resembled, and he drove her batshit crazy with his unwavering and—damn him—incredibly expert persistence.

He talked to her, and his words were familiar. As though they were friends. As though he knew her.

When no one knew her.

His communications were presumptive and intimate, as though he had every right to reach out and just…touch.

At first it had scared her. Then she’d grown angry. And when she couldn’t shake him…

A mixture of rage and terror and confusion. Something she rarely experienced. And she wasn’t grateful.

Not one bit.

But…this man on paper before her, this Cian, this Lazarus, he was a fighter. A man who had no trouble shedding blood—his own or anyone else’s. He was a physical man, not a cerebral one. That he would be able to sit down before a machine and find her again and again was not typical of a man who thrived on the gritty nature of a corporeal hunt, the blood-pounding chase and heady rush of adrenaline. Another paradox, one which gave her doubt.

And Honor hated being uncertain.

She hadn’t been uncertain of anything in the last seven years. Watching her brother and father die in a hail of bullets—and barely surviving the bloodbath—had turned her world starkly monochromatic. She’d been fifteen on that bloody day, and it had shaped every cell of her being into who she’d become: hard, cold, a warrior who fought with every weapon at her disposal.

Namely, her brain.

And there were no shades of gray in her world. Black and white, right and wrong. There was no waffling. Because they’d taken everything: her laughing, gregarious father, her protective, fierce brother. Hannah. The sister they’d stolen, the one she’d been searching for ever since.

The one she had finally found.

“Don’t think about that right now,” she told herself, annoyed. Because she wanted it too much, and that would make her impulsive and foolish, of which she was neither.

First, this. This damned man. Lazarus.

She needed answers.

Because—rock and hard place. Because she’d come to realize that she just might also need him.

If Cian Ahearn was, indeed, her Lazarus.

Her Lazarus.

“Puke,” she said.

Because she didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone. Well, maybe not anyone. There was one, but they were nothing alike.

She wanted evidence, something to convince herself that the risk was worth taking. But the paltry list of facts before her were mostly smoke and mirrors—she knew, because she was a master of illusion—and all she truly had to go on was the handful of interactions they’d had.

The few in which she’d taken part.

Some of it was pride—burn—because he’d found her over and over, forcing her to constantly scrub her tech and rework her entire network. No matter where she was—Seattle, Paris, Sydney. It didn’t matter; he’d infiltrated all of her bolt-holes, following her as easily as if she’d left him a map stamped by a giant, glowing “X.”

It didn’t seem to matter that she was Aequitas—hacker extraordinaire, the faceless, genderless force feared by those whose commodity was flesh, number eight on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. He stalked her like prey; he teased and probed and called her a rứnsearc, an Irish endearment which meant, literally, “secret love.”

Which—seriously—freaked the shit out of her.

He knew who she was—when no one knew who she was. He found her, no matter how invisible she made herself. And he spoke to her as though he liked her.

As though he respected her.

“He’s a copper,” she told herself. “FBI. NSA. CIA. Interpol. MI-6. Badge-carrying motherfucker.”

At least, that’s what she continued to believe. Because it was safer that way, and safe was everything. She couldn’t afford to let herself be drawn into whatever web he was spinning. And if she’d given in once—thanks for nothing Merlot ‘95—and allowed herself to share too much, the details of which were still a little fuzzy, well, she wouldn’t be doing so again.

Because he was only getting bolder. Persistent and mystifying and inexplicable and—goddamn him—tempting.

When Honor was never tempted. Not by anything. Ever.

Which was why contacting him—for any reason—was a Bad Idea.

But…

Hannah.

The alarm had sounded at 4:43 a.m. A facial recognition hit, the sharp peal she’d given up hope of ever hearing. Like lightening, a jolt that froze her limbs and sent a painful wave of stinging heat across her skin. Part of her hadn’t wanted to look. But she wasn’t superstitious or fanciful; facts were her bread and butter. So she’d forced herself to turn on the screen and open the file.

She wouldn’t have thought, after all that she’d seen, that anything could shock her. She’d been wrong.

Hannah.

For years she’d fantasized of finding her sister; imagined again and again that moment of discovery: the joy, the pain, the hope.

But the gaunt, hollow-eyed young woman she’d discovered produced only despair.

I’m too late.

Which was an asinine thought. No matter that the delicate, ginger-haired, giggling girl her sister had once been was now a shadow of her former self, a woman whose bones pressed hard against her pale skin, her cheekbones like blades, her mouth a narrow, unhappy line.

Her hair was flat black, unnatural, startling. A short cap that gleamed dully in the afternoon light. Her eyes were lined in kohl, heavily lashed, but still that bright, shimmering green, as lush as the first leaves of spring.

A shared trait.

Freckles dusted her skin, a pattern not unlike those that dotted Honor’s own cheeks. But it was the scar that was unarguable. That deep, ragged line that halved Hannah’s upper lip, faint now, nothing but a slender silver stroke, the result of a battle over Malibu Barbie a year before the men had come and blown apart their world. Honor had pushed her down, and Hannah had slammed head-first into the corner of the bed, splitting her upper lip wide open.

It was always something for which she’d felt deep shame and regret, but staring at the woman before her, Honor was glad. Because it was definitive proof—something her wishful brain could not misconstrue.

This was Hannah. There was no doubt.

Honor did not consider herself an emotional person. Emotion was, as far as she could tell, useless and untrustworthy. It made people stupid. And while she was honest enough to recognize that everything she did was driven by the rage and pain that lived within her, it was not something to which she ever gave free rein. No, that monster remained under her bed, bound and gagged and chained to the floor.

But looking at her sister, seven years older, changed, her eyes dull and lifeless even as she stood before a brightly lit storefront whose windows displayed the most lavish of wedding gowns, Honor felt that monster stir.

What happened to her?

But Honor knew, if not the details, the grim reality of what likely had become of the beautiful, laughing girl taken at age twelve. Stolen. By men who traded life as commodity, whose evil and greed knew no earthly bounds. Honor had spent the last seven years hunting them and men like them, methodically destroying them one by one, an infestation without end. Men and women alike, hollow souls she felt no guilt for dousing.

And she understood like no other that little remained of the girl she’d once known and loved.

Not that that would stop her. No. She’d been searching too long. She wouldn’t turn away, no matter what lay in wait. She couldn’t. It simply wasn’t in her.

But the clock was ticking. Because other than this brief, still photo and a general location, she had nothing else. No name, no identifying data; Hannah stood alone, adrift, unaccompanied by anyone who might provide more information on where to look.

And time was of